Biden: This is not your father's GOP

Vice President Biden warned female voters against selecting Republican candidates on Friday, painting the GOP as a force that has obstructed progress on equal opportunities for women.

"This is not your father's Republican Party," Biden told the annual conference of the YWCA.
"The other team is taking on virtually every one of the initiatives you and I fought so hard to establish to give girls and women a level chance to have an equal playing field."

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Biden spoke of drafting the original Violence Against Women Act in the early 1990s, and of bringing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on board as an original sponsor.

He expressed shock that the move to reauthorize the act has been met with resistance, and said he and President Obama would be coming back to push the Paycheck Fairness Act, an expansion of the Equal Pay Act passed a half-century ago.

"We shouldn't even be having this debate," Biden said to applause from the audience of mostly women.

Biden recalled a recent visit to the headquarters of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service created in 1996 as part of the Violence Against Women Act. He asked the operator at the hotline, which he said receives 23,000 calls per month, to turn up the volume on one of the calls.

"A young women was on the phone saying, 'I'm calling — oh my God, I see him, oh my God, he's coming. I'm standing between the Radio Shack and the Gap and I'm in — oh, my please, oh God,' " Biden said.

"That's the reality," he added.

Democrats and Obama have been working to maintain their advantage among women, whom recent polls show prefer Obama over presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney by double digits.

Republicans in turn have argued that Obama's economic policies have hurt women disproportionately and that Republican policies will create greater opportunities for both genders.